I spent three days figuring out how to properly configure my Airave 3G (airvana) so it will work from behind my router. So I thought I’d share my findings with the folks on this forum and hopefully save others a lot of wasted time!I’m going to assume you know something about networks in this discussion so you may need to look up a few things if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

The goal is to configure the Airave to work in the following configuration:

MODEM-->ROUTER-->AIRAVE

This is not the “recommended” configuration since Airave would like to be before the router so it can do its QOS thing. However, since I rarely use all 20MB of my internet pipe, I don’t care about the QOS issue and if I did, I could set it up in my router anyway. Also, I want to control my ip address range, etc. so I want my router to be in control, not the lame router that is built into the Airave.

Facts about the Airave 3G that helped me:

The default setup is for it to act as a router with the yellow plug going to the modem and the blue plugs going to the LAN

You can connect to the Airave via a web interface (ONLY from the LAN ports) by connecting to its IP address and usinig username/password of admin/admin (assuming you are connecting from the same network IP range)

The default setup is for the Airave to use an ip address of 192.168.17.1

The default setup is for the Airave to be a DHCP server serving up a range of 192.168.17.2 though 192.168.17.XX (I don’t remember what the max ip address is, but it doesn’t matter)

YOU CAN TURN OFF THE DHCP SERVER!

YOU CAN CHANGE THE AIRAVE’S IP ADDRESS!

Now, here are the steps I took to put the Airave behind my router and correctly configure it to my network. BTW, my network is setup to use the default non-routable class C: 192.168.1.1, and I wanted the Airave to have a static IP address in my network of 192.168.1.161.

I did a hard reset on the Airave (press and hold the little “Reset” button with a paperclip for about 30 seconds). This resets the IP address of the Airave to 192.168.17.1 and turns on the DHCP server.

I rebooted my laptop while connected via ethernet to a LAN port of the Airave (with nothing connected to the WAN port). I also made sure that my wireless network was turned off on my laptop so that the only way it could get an IP address was through the wired connection to the Airave. This gave my laptop a dynamic IP of 192.168.17.2 (or something in the 192.168.17.xx range).

I browsed to the Airave admin webpage by entering the IP address of “192.168.17.1” into my browser for the URL. I logged in using admin/admin

I then went to the “Advanced” tab and changed the IP address to the one I wanted (192.168.1.161). Then I turned OFF the DHCP server option. Oddly, I also had to change the DHCP IP range to be consistent with the new IP address even when I turned the service off, so go ahead and put something like 192.168.1.162 – 192.168.1.163 for the range. Then save the settings by clicking “Apply”. A message appears, but don’t worry and click “ok”.

The Airave will do a soft reset and, as you would expect, you can no longer connect to it from the laptop that has the 192.168.17.XX address. If you want to continue to configure the Airave, you will now have to manually set the IP address on the laptop to something in the new range (such as 192.168.17.162), then connect to the Airave web interface (via the LAN ethernet connection) by typing the new IP address in the URL bar of the browser (in my case it would be 192.168.1.161). I think I did this to turn off the QOS feature of the Airave router, but I don’t think that’s necessary because after we’re done, there won’t be anything on the LAN side of the Airave to throttle!

Now go to your router and set up the configuration for the Airave there. There are a few steps.

First, setup a static lease address for your Airave in your router’s DHCP server. You can get the MAC address from either the sticker on the bottom of the Airave, or usually your router can show you the MAC address of connected devices and you can figure out which one is the Airave since it’s registered to “Airvana, Inc.”). The goal here is to have your router associate the Airave’s MAC address with 192.168.1.161 (or whatever IP you use for the Airave)

Next, you need to open up two ports for the Airave. Usually you do this by setting up “Port Forwarding.” You want to setup UDP ports 5060 and 5061 to be forwarded to the Airave, so that incoming UDP packets are always sent to the Airave.

At this point, you want to power cycle the Airave and give it the required few hours to do it’s thing. At that point, you should get full green lights on the “Mobile”, “GPS”, and “Broadband” lights.

I really hope this helps people. I apologize if I left anything out – I did this about two weeks ago, and I may have forgotten something!

To be clear, when connecting the Airave to the router, the cable coming from the router's LAN port should be plugged into the Airave's WAN port (not the LAN port). The Airave's WAN port is where the connection to the internet (and the rest of the local network) connects. The Airave's LAN port should only be used for connecting a computer to the Airave to configure the Airave via the web interface - that's the only use for the Airave's LAN port connection in this configuration.

I just did this (and do this kinda stuff for a living) and these are my observations.

Step 4 is unnessisary since you will not be using the lan ports. Leave the standard settings there for reconfiguration later if needed and then it'll match what the instruction manual states. Changing it has no effect on performance once setup.

All that really needs to be done is to setup the static IP on the WAN Settings page to match the rest of your network. Choose an address that is in your Routers address but not in the DHCP range of the router (or, just like Step 7 stats, setup a static DHCP Lease). Once complete, only the airvana WAN port will be plugged into the back of your router.

I observed the same performance before and after doing things this way, however, I do NOT like having this unit between the modem and router because it takes forever to reconnect to the net and this unit seems to like to be restarted.

The question here is if you need to connect to the Airave web server via the LAN port (which is the only way to access it), would leaving DHCP on cause problems, since the IP address it will serve up will be on a different network than the Airave iteself. Not sure how it will handle things there. Not a big deal if you don't need to access it again. Performance wise, I agree with Joel that there should be no noticible difference with DHCP on or off.

Progress is being made! It's too bad that there is so little official documentation on this device for the "behind the router" configuration. No one I know wants to run this thing as a router!

The lan ports are independant from this, and for the purposes of configuration, I would leave the DHCP server alone as it will only advertise on the LAN ports.

This device is a "router" too. So, if you put the WAN port IP on the same subnet as the LAN port, it's technically an invalid configuration. Given my current happiness with this devices flawless operation...errr anyway.. I would not "test" this invalid configuration. It will also be easier for one to remember how to configure it by leaving the defaults so that ther operations manual instructions work the same for Joe user.

So, in my professional opinion, I would not do anything to the LAN side and leave the 192.168.17.x and DHCP alone. It will not conflict with any other DHCP server that is upstream from the WAN port. The other side effect of this is that you would no longer need to disable your wireless on your laptop while plugged into this device since they are on seperate IPs. So now, you can connect to the Airave web server AND lookup this thread on the net at the same time.

This thread has been very helpful. I have configured the AIRAVE and my router as described above and I now have a solid green LED for Broadband and GPS. From the Diagnostics page on the Airave I can ping an outside address. My problem is that the Mobile LED is flashing green and I don't have the Airave service. Any suggestions?

Should I bother using your guide if my airave works (except I just started experiencing the incoming calls going to VM problem)? My dsl modem and router are combined, so I don't have the option of putting the airave between the two. Haha